Monday, June 29, 2009

Blogger though I am, I can't deny that there is a major advantage to arguments conducted through the slower media of paper (to say nothing of peer-reviewed publishing): because the length of time between claims and counter-claims is longer, it is somewhat more possible to step back and get clear on just what it is that everyone is claiming. I'm not Luddite (or, as Susan McWilliams would perhaps put it, hypocritical) enough to wish the internet away and resolve to restrict myself to the discipline of the palimpsest, but I confess to somewhat wishing for those kind of belabored traces and delays to help me make it through the mutlifaceted argument which has erupted between my colleagues at Front Porch Republic and the writers at the Postmodern Conservative blog over the past few days. Still, let me try to explain the argument as I understand it.

It started with a couple of brief comments made by Pomocons Peter Lawler and Ivan Kenneally, expressing serious disagreement with what they see as the "polis envy" expressed by Patrick Deneen, the localists of FPR, and other "true deep communitarians" who worry too much about the "material conditions" necessary for community and tradition to flourish. Those comments were noticed by Jason Joseph, who saw in them a harbinger of a major conflict over the direction of American conservatism: should conservatives "embrace democratic capitalism while rejecting its Enlightenment presuppositions," or should they "reject modernity outright"? (Jason here is perhaps unintentionally echoing Damon Linker, who labels those who congregate around FPR and similar sites as "reactionaries," which is mildly disconcerting for leftists like myself who write over there.) A few weeks later, Patrick threw down the gauntlet on the FPR website and, well, the debaterolledonward (andcontinues) fromthere.

The possibility that this argument really comes down how one responds to modernity in general (and modern liberal democracy and democratic capitalism in particular) is clearly true in some important way or another. It's a possibility which appears to me to be essentially reflected in Patrick's framing of the dispute around "nature’s laws and limits." Under this reading, Pomocons affirm that the modern individual, understood as a being in possession of natural rights, obviously still longs for virtue and a context within which to realize and practice such, but is also confident that there are opportunities for virtue concomitant with all the social transformations which modernity has brought with it, as nature still abides. Hence, the "restlessness and alienation" which thinking conservatives of all stripes note about the modern world is best supplemented with an "easy-going quiescence." In contrast to this, the FPR position is presumably a more radical one, whereby modern life's obsession with technology and growth (of economic possibility and personal individuation and choice) is seen as possibly resulting in "a potentially catastrophic confrontation with natural limits and attendant human suffering." Hence, the need for a "reactionary" response, one which Lawler humorously characterized as an "it takes a medieval village" attitude, and which Kenneally, most seriously, indicts as an attitude which "embrace[s] certain conditions that make free moral life optimally possible but then reduce[s] the possibility of that freedom to the historical circumstances within which it emerges." Lawler's and Kennally's view may not be entirely fair to the distinction which Patrick introduces--and which he moderates in several comments--but it is not, I think, fundamentally untrue to it, as Patrick ultimately sets up the FPR position as one which posits nature and the virtues associated with such in opposition to modernity, claiming that, as admirable the benefits of modern life may be to the development of the human person, "modern goods are only worthy of being embraced because we are not living wholly in modernity." This all perhaps coincides with James Poulos's assessment of the debate, which suggests again that the real issue is what we think of modernity: "Front Porchers seem inclined to treat liberalism as the false consciousness inculcated to justify modernity, or some such, while Pomocons, I think, are inclined to recognize that liberalism is not simply a symptom of modernity."

It seems to me that the truth is that, as FPR has developed, its primary theme has thus not been a resistance to the trends of democracy and equality in modern history, with attendant conceptualizations of the nature of the individual and their rights and how all of may relate to the foregoing. Not to say that such isn't an important intellectual debate, nor to deny that there are writers at FPR who very clearly adopt such an approach, but it is not, I think, what primarily motivates those who worry about the fate of the front porch. You can accommodate on said porch a variety of understandings of, and recommendations for, individual persons seeking virtue in the midst of modernity's engagement with (conquest of?) the natural world. What brings us to the porch, first and foremost, I think, is the first of the three words in our subhead--not "liberty" (whether individual or otherwise), not "limits" (of nature or of something else), but "place." Which is why, as I said in my first contribution to this argument, and which I still believe a few days of comment-tracking later, the back-and-forthsnarking about Marx--with attendant commentary from many others--is actually pretty important to what we're actually all about.

Lawler's insight into the Rousseauian and romantic commonalities between agrarian/localist diagnoses of the modern condition and Marxist/socialist ones is actually pretty trenchant and accurate, I think most especially because--and, given the way the liberationist left so often misunderstood and abused social democratic understandings of solidarity in the past, perhaps it is not surprising that this should come as a surprise to many people--it unintentionally underscores the relevance of authority (the authority of tradition, of community, of a people joined together in a common project of respect and participation) to what agrarians, localists, and, yes, Front Porchers, insist is crucial to a proper understanding of the meaning of "place." I'll draw here upon something I've written before about Normal Mailer's on-first-glance-weird-but-in-fact-quite-profound claim that he wished to "think in the style of Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke":

[Mailer] wants to be an egalitarian, but he doesn't want to be a liberal, because liberalism simply isn't compatible, in his thinking, with "family, home, faith, hard work, duty, allegiance" and other "dependable human virtues"....[His belief was] that the modern world has been fundamentally conditioned by...abstractions and transformations[;]...traditions and communities cannot exercise the same authority they once did in a world in which individual subjectivity has conditioned our very understanding of the self (at least in the West--but increasingly, most everywhere else as well)....Marx...recognized the truth of the Burkean (though for him it was really more Hegelian, and therefore Rousseauian) insight into the connection between consciousness and communal, historical, material reality. Repairing the human consciousness did not mean a continuing project of subjective liberation, with the aim of making the burdens of modernity privately manageable, but rather addressing issues of power and and place and production that make the transformations of modernity--and most particularly the spaital ones, with solid traditions and properties and roles and locales evaporating into the thin air of free trade and the cash economy--into alienating burdens in the first place....[T]he Rousseauian perspective says, okay, our original, grounded nature has been lost, we're in chains....Rousseau's response [to this problem, and thus Marx's too] preserves true conservative seriousness...it respects the need for embeddedness and connection by suggesting that we remake our chains--that we remake modernity, and resist those who would portray our restless condition as a faitaccompli, the emergence of which was inherent to our natures. Why can we do that? Because within and through modernity the deep structure abides; we're just having difficulties actualizing it, because we've been so intent in fighting internecine battles within liberalism that we've ignored all the other ways in which we could be responding to the world.

The position I articulate here is heavily influenced by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who argues for an alternative understanding of modernity, one in which the ecology of modern life itself reveals a consciousness of, and need for, traditionally and communally realized moral instincts and epiphanies. Modern liberal and egalitarian goods are real, this position says, but they must not be allowed to interfere with or supplant--as opposed to being articulated so as to complement--the authority of more necessary, traditional, local, communal goods. Moreover, this position follows Hegel and the romantic tradition (which itself drew upon older, mystical ones) in acknowledging that there is a subjective, constructed, generally willed aspect to our deep structure, and those traditional and communal goods which reflect it; it sees that structure as something which emerges and thus must be regularly re-articulated and contextually realized. In Rousseau's philosophy, this willed engagement with and the movement to preserve communal grounds in the midst of history had a tragic character to it. Marx, to his eternal discredit, dismissed with that sense of tragedy, embracing instead a historical materialism and a determinism which ultimately justified thousands in seeing themselves (and the states they would take control of) as vanguards to bring Marxist solidarity or death to the millions of people. Nothing remotely admirable about any of that, to be sure. But Marx's diagnosis of modern liberal life, and in particular of the weight and the alienating cost of our the loss of structures and traditions and thoroughly material connection with the work of our hands and with our fellow man, rings absolutely true.

Clearly, what I'm laying out here doesn't represent the common self-understanding of the FPR community (some of whom would reject even labeling it a community); I don't know if there are any other Taylor fans there besides myself, though there is at least one Norman Mailer fan. As for Marx, more than a few FPRers are willing to acknowledge the significance of his approach to the question of modern liberalism, but is that acknowledgment any different from that which is offered by Pomocons, such as in the post from Lawler I cited above, or that which they confessed to on their site way back at the beginning? Perhaps not on the level of theory, but on the level of practice, I think so. Of the great many "practical" posts that have appeared on FPR, the percentage that have any sort of connection with Marx's analysis of alienation, commodification, and forms of production is very nearly zero...except, of course, for their deep communitarian willingness to talk about different forms of association, organization, distribution, and expression which would allow--and, different political and cultural and socio-economic reforms, both high and low, which would enable and extent--the doing of things differently with one's occupations and talents and property and education and land and position in life.

It perhaps reveals something important that Ralph Hancock, on the Pomocon website, acknowledges that Pomocons are more "politically realistic," being "regime-thinkers" who see the need to "making friends with real political forces," so as to influence the public, political realm and thereby protect and preserve virtues which flourish privately. Which, again, might well seem to be exactly the sort of thing mentioned up above (supporting--and paying for--certain activies for the sake of empowering people on their porches), save for the fact that Marxist/Rousseauian/socialist/localist/republican/populist/agrarian/what-have-you critiques put the division of public and private into question, asking whether or not it isn't the emergence of a "regime"--particularly a liberal one--in the first place that necessarily marks off that which the people, as defenders of their places, ought to be able to exercise some real sovereignty over. I can certainly be criticized for being an Obama-voter (hey, I can criticize myself for it!), but at least I don't think I've ever made the mistake of thinking that the partisan and electoral system which produced him and his agenda ever were or could be tools for setting the inherently discursive, dialogic, and thus political nature of our moral and communal lives right, which the theoconservative and First Things crowds in general have been occasionally tempted to believe the Republican party could and should do. To be sure, the platform of the Democratic party--particularly in its more progressive bureaucratic or judicial incarnations--does the same. Which only goes to show, I think, the need to constantly search for alternatives, to happily (if perhaps only partially) embrace the stupid accusation which Jonah Goldberg threw at Rod Dreher long ago (that the Crunchy Con movement, and all those sympathetic to it, are implicated in "Christian Marxism" and Fabian socialism, posing like "Jean-Jacques Rousseau in a Russell Kirk mask"), and, most importantly, to--as Mailer put it--think like Marx (and ChrisopherLasch, and Wendell Berry, and Ivan Illich, and Dorothy Day, and Juliet Schor, and...). Doing so, I think at least, gives us our best chance to get out from under the regimented regime supports--the parties and profitability margins--which, as Sheldon Wolin put it while speaking of John Locke, turn around the traditional question of "what type of political order is required if society is to be maintain?" (a properly conservative question if there every was one), replacing it instead with the question "what social arrangements will insure the continuity of government?" I know, from my own association with them, that the Pomocons certainly don't believe that just so long as society and culture and the manufacture of profits follow the meritocracy, we have no truly fundamental problem. It is interesting, though, to see them raise eyebrows and doubts and sniggers at those who figure, as radicals of all sorts always have, that since that isn't true, something ought to be done about it.

This turned into another one of my long navel-gazing posts, which is likely to be of interest to about eight people tops. So let me finish it off my pointing at this fine contribution by James Poulos, in which he asks questions that are more humble, and as such admit to no easy theoretical demarcations: how does one balance loves for embedded communities versus perhaps "superficial" but nonetheless just as authentically affections for contemporary life? Can individuals through their own ethical choices really ever resolve such dilemmas, or must people operate in solidarity and community with one another to do so? And if the latter, which community, on what level of abstraction, if any? I have my answers to some of those, and no doubt he has his, as does probably everyone who has gotten tangled up in this argument one way or another. All our answers are, to be sure, tentative. Which I guess makes me glad that I'm just writing a blog post here after all.

12 comments:

Alan Jacobs
said...

This is an argument that isn't going to get anywhere until ll the participants agree to refrain from using any words that contain the string "modern." That sequence of letters, with it's usual array of prefixes and adjectives, has done a great deal to impede genuine debate in the lady few decades. Its penumbras are too many, too ghostly, and too persistent. Away with it, I say.

Alan, there is something deeply funny, or ironic, or whatever, about your description of the ghostliness and persistence and indistictiveness of "modernity," being written from an iPhone. But perhaps only quasi-Luddites like myself can see the humor. Thanks for the comment, though. Your ideas about the damaging effects of, and the need to get away from a concern with that which is or isn't "modern" echo some of James Poulos's recent statements. Is he borrowing from you, or vice versa? (Or maybe this is a "great minds think alike" sort of thing.)

For what it's worth, I think I mostly agree with you (and him); making this debate, or any debate, "about" modernity is a recipe for confusion. Stephen White helped me decide a while ago that modern vs. postmodern is a basically useless argumentative strategy; we're all just "late-moderns," and we should leave it at that. The actual debate (over "modernity" or anything else) is, I think, as I say here, better expressed in other terms.

Like you, I also think of that term "place" as what attracts me to FPR's arguments, even as I read some of these folks and find myself thinking, uncharitably, I admit, that they're like Survivalists but with better backgrounds in philosophy ("They'll get my Summa when . . ."). In my more charitable moments, I read them and feel like my students when I talk to them about Thoreau: This is all very well and good, but how does this work--if, indeed, it ever could--in our particular moment?

Part of the answer--or maybe it's another way of reframing the question--may be the distinction you made here between "independence" and "sovereignty." As I think about these things, the Front Porch-as-political space ("politics" here being broadly defined) can never be completely autonomous, nor should it be--otherwise, it leads to a relativism of a conservative sort. To my mind, the Front Porch is ideally a sovereign space: it becomes respected not through mere assertion but negotiation. FPR's big bugaboo is modernity, and rightly so: much liberty "we" once had has now been lost; but when contrasted with the history of the evolving political status of people of African descent in this country, it's hard both to avoid rebutting FPR with, "Really, now, what do you have to complain about?" and to point to that evolving status as a possible solution to the dilemma FPR finds us located in.

In my quixotic quest to make the idea of cycling-as-serious-transportation seem slightly less absurd here in Wichita, it's quickly become obvious to me that simply making the "cyclists are people, too" argument won't cut much ice here. The argument has to be stated in terms of how accommodating cyclists redounds to the benefit of everyone who uses the roads. Such an argument, I think, simultaneously asserts and respects the sovereignty of all users of surface transportation.

[T]he Front Porch-as-political space ("politics" here being broadly defined) can never be completely autonomous, nor should it be--otherwise, it leads to a relativism of a conservative sort. To my mind, the Front Porch is ideally a sovereign space: it becomes respected not through mere assertion but negotiation

...and I appreciate the way you connect with that older post of mine on the distinction between "independence" and "sovereignty." However, I have to question why you call modernity FPR's "big bugaboo"; obviously many people, including some who write for the site itself, think modernity's the problem or at least present claims which tend in that direction, but my argument is that modernity isn't what's being disputed, and that the more we (both FPRers and their interlocutors) go forward assuming that the argument is all about modernity's transgression of natural limits and such, the more we'll be missing the practical substance of things. I think Marx (following Rousseau) is a good guide to the morass, because both of them accept that modernity and modern subjectivity is what we have and are, and so the question of how to conserve things in the face of technology and self-interest must become a practical (or, if you prefer, distributable, material, general, collective) one. The questions which follow that framing of the dispute allows us to get on to the matter of actually seeking to establish such material sovereignties, which are matters that won't ever really be addressed if you haven't allowed yourself to notice the unquestioned reign of the market in the meantime.

Sorry for the philosophy; I don't know how to mix to the Platonic and the pratical as well as you. Your line about "simultaneously assert[ing] and respect[ing] the sovereignty of all users" of a given space sums it all up very well, I think.

Interesting post, Professor Fox. I can't say as I'm that familiar with the debates going on around the Front Porch Republic website, but I really appreciate your articulating some of the questions I'd been struggling with since I left college.

For a long time, I've been sympathetic to the ideological-communitarian critique of liberalism, and my study of Hegel and Marx helped me give voice to that, to a certain extent - and after that, Soren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth (with their emphasis on the need to live out of an authentic existence grounded in commitment to something real and meaningful - like a religious community - rather than living out of an ideological or rationalist abstraction).

I'm currently reading what I can get my hands on of Nikolay Berdyaev (another existentialist who critiques Marx along similar lines), but you've definitely added to my reading list here - I'll have to track down some Norman Mailer. Thanks much!

Thanks for the comment. But please, don't read Normal Mailer for the philosophy! He's a novelist, and not always a good one. The quote I make reference to is from his book The Armies of the Night, and it's basically a long, second-person retelling of how Mailer himself, a novelist and intellectual, made sense of the popular protests during the Vietnam war. He's stumbled upon an important idea in that book, but he really doesn't theorize it in any way.

I'll have to look up Nikolay Berdyaev; I've never heard of him before.

Russell,Thanks for your reply. I engaged in a bit of overgeneralization in my earlier comment: I had in mind the washing-our-hands tone of some FPRers re modernity without acknowledging that I know that's not your tone.

Incidentally, I have to say as an admirer of FPR that it's good to see them getting pushed a little by some outside voices.

Alan, I read your comment, and like it. As always, you have a purer, and far more succinct, grasp of words and ability to express their limits than I. Thanks for putting your boot into our back-and-forths!

This is a wonderful post and not just because I'm also the square circle that is a Taylor/Mailer fan. (Well, okay: actually, I admit to only having read "Harlot's Ghost..but I do appreciate Taylor.")

Can I just note that stumbling upon this blog (because of a reference to John Milbank) has completely delighted me? I'm so happy to see a Christian who doesn't think that their faith is best expressed in an undying devotion to the planetary casino of late capitalism, as well as someone concerned for the ravages of capitalism who doesn't think the best solution is hyper-liberalism/anti-liberalism, awaiting some mysterious revolutionary event or becoming lifestyle/identity obsessed.

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."